


Just Like a Cigarette...

by Luna_Flare



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: AU, Cigarettes, Coma, General, M/M, Minutemen, Smoking, Suicide mention, The Castle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 10:39:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18737374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna_Flare/pseuds/Luna_Flare
Summary: Washington falls back upon unhelpful coping mechanisms when his husband lies in a coma after being poisoned by an unknown assailant.(This is also posted in the Washington collection thing).





	Just Like a Cigarette...

Washington had been thinking about it for a while. Ever since  _she_ had shown up, really, with all the stress and John - God, John. He still hadn't woken up and it made Washington feel sick. Someone had poisoned him, poisoned his John, and he still hadn't woken up.

He'd been moved out of their quarters into a medical room not long after he'd passed out and they had concluded that John had not gone feral. Off the symptoms that he'd described, the medical team had concluded arsenic poisoning, but even so, even after they'd ‘cured him’, he still hadn't woken up. All Washington could bring himself to do was sit with him. It hurt. What if he just never woke up?  

They'd given him the final say. John wasn't on life support, so it wasn't costly to keep him alive, but it was still degrading, and Washington knew, from when he saw it on other soldiers, other Minutemen, after people were in a coma for more than a few weeks, especially after a month, they were just gone. Muscle wasted away, struggling to function, and then the infection would get them from bed sores or something.

He'd been out for six days, 150 odd hours, and currently, he had shown no sign of waking up. He'd said two weeks. Give it two weeks and then he'd have to be given the fatal injection and die. It hurt to think about. He tapped the cigarette box that he picked up idly. He'd confessed the temptation to John before he'd gone under and it was the angriest he’d seen John in a while. He'd only meant it as a light-hearted comment but John had gone slightly mad about it, noting "health concerns". What did he care? He didn't care. He was over sixty, longer than his parents had lived, but yet again, as he looked at the sleeping ghoul in front of him, John was ten years older than him, but he shouldn't have to just… die.

Losing muscle mass was a concern. John just didn't have the weight to burn and the medic was concerned that John's body would attack his heart if he didn't wake up soon. He was on a sugar drip, the tech that had been recovered from the BOS after the Prydwen crashed. Fortunate, or else John could have had a heart attack and died not long after he passed out.

Washington would trade all of his time to give John another day. John didn't want to die, not like him. Even when he'd lost his daughter he'd bounced back up fairly quickly, at least as far as he'd been told. And John, he had no reason to lie to him. They'd been together so long that there would be no reason, and now there was a chance that he was going to outlive John and he didn't want to. He placed a chaste kiss on John’s hand and left. He wandered up to the roof of the Castle and stared into the ocean.

He remembered jumping off here in his late thirties, convinced he wanted to die. Looking at what had happened since, it was probably good that he hadn't, but on nights like this, the temptation to do so was overbearing. The sea called his name.

He could remember John confessing that he thought he was going to go feral, the slight tremor in his voice that showed him desperately trying to avoid a panic attack or bursting into tears. He didn't see John cry often, but… going feral was something else, worse than death. Trapped in your own body.

He struck up a cigarette and took a heavy drag from it. He couldn't care anymore. If he died, he died. He was only living on borrowed time. And how it looked, John wasn't going to make it. And if this was going to kill him, it was a way out of a world without John.

They'd told them in the Institute that John'd go feral and he wouldn't.  The thought was earth-shattering. He didn't want to have to kill John and live on. But the signs were there. They'd all been there. He'd been so scared...

And then he fell into the coma.

He felt relaxed and light-headed, like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, like nothing even mattered, and he remembered what had drawn him to this as a kid.

He started out, watching the high tide lap against the Castle walls. So what if this killed him? He couldn't bring himself to care.


End file.
